'Scratch' programming becomes child's play

LEXINGTON, Mass. After school lets out on Fridays at Jonas Clarke Middle School, two dozen boisterous students descend on the computer lab to fiddle with the computer code that powers their projects, from a "Star Wars" light saber duel to a flying hippo animation.

The school has been beta-testing Scratch, a new programming language released last week by the Lifelong Kindergarten Group at the MIT Media Lab. The program, named after the technique hip-hop DJs use to mix music, gives novices the ability to create dynamic programs without wading through a manual, teaching computer programming concepts while encouraging students to play.

The goal: turn a daunting subject usually taught in college and considered the domain of geeks into an integral part of education for the grade school set. MIT researchers hope the program will promote a broader cultural shift, giving a generation already comfortable using computers to consume content online a set of new, easy-to-use tools to change the online landscape itself.

The lab also has created a social networking site to provide Scratch users of all ages a community in which they can critique each others' projects.

"All the social networks out there now are basically about chatting with one another, not about creating things or sharing their creations," said Mitchel Resnick, head of the Scratch development team. "We as a society are moving in a direction where creative thinking is more important than ever before. Just learning a fixed set of facts in school isn't going to be enough."

As the projects among sixth- and seventh-graders in Lexington audibly and visibly demonstrate, Scratch unlike other forays into computer science fosters projects that bear the distinct imprint of "kid culture," Resnick says.

Christine Leung and Nancy Chomitz, both 12, began by making simple animations in which characters talk on-screen, but have begun to try interactive projects. Nancy's "flying moon hippo," for instance, blurts out funny phrases when people press different letters. In their current project, a snowman floats across the screen; when he gets into certain spots, a cartoon bubble appears saying, "OMG!! I'M MELTING!!"

MIT has "a very long history of working in this area; finding ways to really engage students at a young age, to encourage their interest in computing and programming, and to give them a sense of mastery to help overcome the false conception that this is a really hard area and you have to be a genius to do it," said Chris Stephenson, executive director of the Computer Science Teachers Association, an organization based in New York that promotes computer science education.

Scratch -- a free download at http://www.scratch.mit.edu -- is easy enough for kindergarten-age children to use some of the functions, according to Karen Randall, a teacher at Expo Elementary School in St. Paul, Minn., who has been testing the program before its official launch.